According to NPR: “The White House plans to nominate Carolyn Lerner (MI ‘84) to run the Office of Special Counsel, which represents federal whistle-blowers and other victims of discrimination within the government.”

Read the full article.

The TSA Board is developing a 5-year Strategic Plan for the Truman Scholars Association.  The Board wants all Truman Scholars to have the opportunity to provide input before defining the path TSA will take over the next 5 years.  To give your thoughts on where TSA should go from here, please fill out the form below (or visit http://www.trumanscholars.org/blog/strategicplan). The TSA Board will present the full Strategic Plan to the Truman Scholar community at the 2011 National Conference.  We look forward to hearing your ideas!

The current mission of the Truman Scholars Association (TSA) is to build, maintain, and educate a community of Truman Scholars; to foster a lifelong commitment to public service in all its forms through intellectual, personal, and professional development; and to support and promote public service.

We have been working to accomplish these goals through a number of activities, including maintaining a TSA listserve, holding National Conferences, organizing smaller events like In the Running and a Reunion at the 20th Anniversary of TSLW, hosting pre-interview dinners for Truman finalists, etc.

Please answer the following questions to help us tailor TSA's mission and future activities, as part of TSA's current Strategic Plan initiative.

Dear Fellow Truman Scholars,

I would like to thank all of you for the outpouring of good wishes I have received from Truman Scholars since I announced my return to Fort Worth as the 19th President at Texas Wesleyan University. The common thread of the messages I received was that the Truman Scholarship and the Truman Community have changed lives for the better, an experience I shared -- as a 1977 Scholar, Senior Scholar at Truman Scholars Leadership Week, Finalist Selection Committee member, interview panelist, member of the Foundation Board, and Executive Secretary. The Truman Foundation’s profound effect on young people and on public service will continue into the future.  And I am confident we will continue to see new scholars rise in the ranks of distinguished public servants.

Although I will certainly miss the regular interactions I had with Scholars in my role as Executive Secretary, I am very pleased that the Foundation’s Board has asked me to remain involved in a formal way as Foundation Treasurer. In this role I will remain very engaged in setting the future direction of the Foundation, both in terms of financial strength and of the Foundation’s increased involvement with the Truman Scholars Association and the Truman Community.

The Truman Foundation plays a significant role in identifying and preparing young people to become tomorrow’s public service leaders. This work would not be possible without the time and energy so many members of the community contribute on a daily basis to support the Foundation and TSA. I am thankful to have been a part of this work for so many years, and look forward to continuing this involvement in a formal role.  And I look forward to staying in touch with the many Scholars I have been privileged to meet over the years.

Sincerely,

Fred Slabach (MS '77)
Executive Secretary
Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation

Monica Bell (SC '02) co-authored a piece published by The Washington Post entitled, "A Distraction of the Road to a Better Welfare System."

Read the full article.

By Jennifer Lambert (SC '00)

As a recent PhD graduate interested in work involving development, security and the Middle East, Jennifer Lambert (SC ’00) called upon the Truman community to find someone with relevant experience.  She quickly connected with Matthew Mingus (CO ’86), who recently returned from working on governance and development issues in Iraq.

Matthew was a double major in speech communications and public affairs at the University of Denver when he won the Truman Scholarship in 1986.  His desire to work with community development organizations drove his interest in public service.  And after his undergraduate degree, he did work for community-based non-profits in Colorado and Michigan.  Yet his love for learning, influenced by the work of some influential teachers, drove Matthew back to school, where he earned an MPA and PhD in Public Administration.  He is now a professor of governance at Western Michigan University.

Most of Matthew’s research focused on comparative public administration—comparing two or more countries like Canada and the United States.  While he found his research compelling, he continued searching for international consulting opportunities to broaden his knowledge and expertise.  It is this desire that led a rather comfortable and tenured professor in Michigan to apply for the opportunity to serve as a senior governance specialist with an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Iraq.

By the time the State Department called to interview Matthew, he had talked with several people who had been to Iraq before and served in similar capacities.  So when he was presented with the opportunity, Matthew felt he had a good idea of what he was signing up to do.  Of course, no person’s path to Iraq comes without obstacles, and Matthew’s biggest obstacle was making this work with wife of 19 years and a 15 year old daughter.  While his wife was against the idea at the start, she was much more supportive by his first R&R because she could see how excited he was by the work he was doing in Iraq.  But perhaps Matthew was aided by the speed of events after taking the opportunity.  Within weeks of being hired, Matthew was training for his Iraq adventure just outside DC.  And after just three weeks of training, he was landing at the military side of Baghdad International Airport.

Of course, going to Iraq comes with risks, so his family’s hesitancy is certainly understandable.  While he had some concerns and worries about his own safety, Matthew said he basically let the US military personnel worry about security and focused his attention on learning about a foreign culture and doing his job.  He remarked, rather casually, “You know we have the best trained security personnel in the world in the US armed services.  I wasn’t preoccupied with concern about my safety; I let the people whose job it was to protect my team worry about that.” 

Matthew’s job consisted of working with local governments to teach local officials, in his words, “that democracy means more than just elections.”  Life under a dictator in Iraq meant that nearly all decisions were made by a highly centralized regime in Baghdad, so most members of town councils and provincial governments had little experience in actually making decisions and implementing them.  One of the biggest lessons that Matthew and his colleagues taught Iraqis was how to communicate more democratically to reach a consensus. 

Perhaps his biggest accomplishment was helping the more rural provincial governments, called qadas, surrounding Baghdad work together and advocate for their collective interests.  Matthew says that this is a classic urban politics problem.  When locales live near a large urban center, most of the attention and resources get devoted to that urban center and leave many of the suburban and rural surrounding districts with less clout.  These more rural districts now hold a semiannual conference and have learned to work more closely to get their districts’ concerns and issues addressed.

Overall, Matthew said it was a great experience, it will contribute positively to his research and course content, and it gave him the opportunity to learn about a completely foreign culture.  He had never been in an Arab state before and didn’t have an educational background in anything related to the Middle East.  Matthew characterizes the Iraqi people as “a friendly, open, and extremely hospitable people who have a very hands-on and engaged culture, particularly when in groups, but individuals can be very reserved.”  During meetings, when a new person entered the room, everything often stopped as people greeted and welcomed the new member.  “It made for some long meetings,” Matthew recalled, “but it shows just how warm and hospitable the Iraqi people really are.”

If other Truman Scholars are interested in similar work, Matthew said most of the current opportunities to serve on PRTs are now in Afghanistan.  The key is to talk to people who have done it before, so you can figure out if the opportunity is right for you and how to get connected to the opportunities available.  Most opportunities are available at usajobs.gov (U.S. government) and devnetjobs.org (private contractors and NGOs).

Jennifer Lambert (SC ’00) recently completed her PhD in Political Science (International Relations/Middle East) and is currently teaching at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.

For this interview, Todd Gaziano (WV ‘83), Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation and Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, was interviewed by Bill Rivers (DE ‘09).

Gaziano has worked in all three branches of the federal government. He served first as judicial law clerk to the Honorable Edith H. Jones, United States Judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Gaziano later worked in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, where he helped provide legal advice to the President, Attorney General, and other Cabinet secretaries.  As Chief Counsel to the House Subcommittee on National Economic Growth, Natural Resources, and Regulatory Affairs, he worked closely with Chairman David McIntosh on government-wide regulatory reform legislation and regulatory agency oversight. A John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, he received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

As Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, Gaziano focuses on issues relating to the separation of powers, the role of the courts, civil rights, and Supreme Court jurisprudence, working closely with the Edwin Meese, the 75^th Attorney General of the United States. In addition to these duties, in early 2008 Gaziano was appointed by the House of Representatives to serve for six years on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Bill Rivers is a recent graduate from the University of Delaware, where he studied International Relations and History. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and a 2010 Simon Fellow, he currently directs marketing and fundraising for Water Is Life-Kenya, (www.kenyawaterislife.com) a Delaware-based non-profit dedicated to developing clean, sustainable water resources in Southern Kenya.

Your family has a unique history with the Truman Foundation, doesn’t it?

I was only the second Truman Scholar from West Virginia University. Several more were selected from WVU in the next five years, including two of my relatives—my first cousin, Anthony Majestro, and my younger brother, Thomas Gaziano. My brother Tom also went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship and now teaches at Harvard Medical School. The Truman Foundation will always have a very special place in our family.

One of the core principles of the Truman Foundation is a commitment to public service. You’ve worked in all three branches of the federal government. What have you learned from that experience?

It’s been incredibly interesting and helpful to have worked in all three branches, especially for someone who studies the separation of powers. Except for three years I spent at a law firm in Houston, my entire career has been either in direct government service or at a think tank focusing on law and public policy.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is the principal defender of the President’s prerogatives vis-à-vis the other branches. It also settles many internal, executive-branch legal disputes, including any legal issues the President wants resolved. It’s a great job because it includes both providing legal advice (including to the President) and serving as an executive-branch court of last resort. Later, when I was a House counsel, that experience was incredibly helpful in conducting executive-branch oversight. In short, defining and defending executive power helps show where its limits lie.

Moreover, both of those jobs have been quite valuable in the work I’m now doing on the Commission on Civil Rights. The Commission is directed to investigate and report on civil rights enforcement policy to Congress and the President. Congress and the President also each appoint half the commissioners, so it’s important to understand the perspectives, prerogatives, and priorities of each branch.

Civil Rights seem to be a long-standing focus of your career. You also grew up in West Virginia. What influence, if any, did your home state have in shaping that focus?

My father was in the first generation born in America of impoverished, Sicilian immigrants. Discrimination against Italian Catholics from 1935-65 in southern West Virginia coalfields was strong. It wasn’t as bad as that against African Americans, but the bias he faced was not subtle. Nevertheless, my grandparents taught my father and his siblings that, no matter what level of societal discrimination or their lack of wealth, they could succeed in America and that it was their destiny to do so.

The civil rights struggles were quite different in that era than today, but I think more people should try to teach a similar lesson to their kids despite the current societal struggles. My father went from the young son of parents who spoke Italian at home to one of the most respected physicians in West Virginia. It’s important for us to teach our children that they are still largely responsible for their own success—regardless of the type of discrimination that still exists.

Where is America on the question of Civil Rights today?

Landmark Civil Rights legislation was enacted in the 1960s which helps guarantee equality of opportunity. Since then, the argument intensified about whether society needed to be more concerned with equality of opportunity or equality of results. Although some think we can pursue both without conflict, a conflict soon emerges with government’s efforts to do both. If the government steps in to try to ensure equality of results among different racial, ethnic, or other groups, it necessarily interferes with the equality of opportunity for all of them. And sometimes public policies that try to address a disparate impact in a particular way not only interfere with the equality of opportunity, but they make the underlying problem worse. The law of unintended consequences is an unforgiving force.

It’s wonderful, however, that it no longer takes courage to condemn open, blatant racism. This wasn’t always the case. Racist statements are immediately condemned these days. Comedians and politicians lose their careers over them. And they should. The public change in attitudes and the rapid increase in interracial dating and marriage shows how much progress we have made.

We’re still trying to live up to the promise of the 14^th Amendment, and we still have a way to go. But there are other threats today to our individual liberty; some of them come from a government that not only interferes with them directly (like screening at airports) but may interfere with our economic opportunities indirectly.

Let’s talk about the courts. In the beginning of the Republic, most of the federal government’s power seemed to be held by the legislative branch. In the 20^th century, that seemed to shift to the executive. Is there now a shift of power underway in the federal government toward the judicial branch?

All three branches of the national government have grown in power and influence over the lives of Americans. The federal courts’ power has grown in proportion to the rest of government, and some of that has been necessary and for the good. The historic desegregation decisions of the 1950s and 1960s are an example. The courts’ persistent enforcement of the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection was necessary during the ugly period of massive resistance.

But once they began to exercise extraordinary remedies, including some controversial integration decrees, it became attractive for activist groups to urge the use of those same powers for more questionable ends. At about that same time, some legal doctrines that tended to encourage judicial activism, unmoored from the text and original public meaning of the Constitution, were gaining currency. This and the growth of the federal government generally led the courts to assume even more power.

While there’s hardly an issue the federal courts won’t decide now, at least there is a healthy trend back to a more careful interpretation of the Constitution that relies more on the text and its original public meaning.

You’re saying there’s been a trend toward Originialism?

I think so. The issue got an incredible public boost twenty-five years ago with a series of speeches on originalism that then Attorney General Ed Meese gave. Those talks helped launch a debate that re-invigorated that school of thought. The Heritage Foundation just celebrated the anniversary of those talks with a symposium of scholars at the Supreme Court with General Meese and Justice Alito. Today, regardless of legal scholars’ personal positions on textualism or originalism, its hard to deny that they are serious, mainstream approaches to constitutional interpretation.

Just look at the Supreme Court’s use of originalism in the landmark Second Amendment cases of the last five years. In DC vs. Heller, the question was whether the Second Amendment protected only the rights of state militia to keep and bear arms or the right of all Americans, regardless of service in a militia. Both sides engaged in a serious parsing of the text and a discussion of its original public meaning. Regardless of what the justices thought the right historical answer was, none of them were willing to say that the text or its original public meaning was irrelevant.

I’d like to switch gears for a minute and talk about the legal profession, especially as it relates to starry-eyed, newly minted Truman Scholars. There is a popular understanding now that recent college graduates, if unable to find a job, can always apply to law school. The thinking goes that a JD is a great thing to have, even if you never use it.  Is this true?

I don’t recommend law school to everyone regardless of interest, but I do recommend it to a lot of people. Assuming you have sufficient interest in the type of subjects studied in law school, it’s a great interdisciplinary degree. I thought it was a fascinating course of study that combines some of the wisdom of the ages from history, sociology, economics, political science, linguistics, and rhetoric.

Law school is also really good training for the mind. Lawyers are taught to spot issues in a particular way before they try to come up with the right answer. It teaches you to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant facts in prior cases. What differences are immaterial? Why? In hard cases, there is no easy answer. Law school focuses on the hard cases, and that really trains the mind in a manner that is useful in many fields.

It’s also a very versatile degree for other reasons. Besides a lot of specialties in legal practice, it can be helpful in business, government, public policy, the nonprofit world, teaching and more. It allows you to change your career plans.

Lastly, it’s about the easiest doctorate degree to obtain. My four brothers are MDs. They had to work harder and study longer than most of my lawyer friends.

An overwhelming majority of members of Congress, both past and present, have been lawyers. And it makes sense for legislators and members of the judiciary. But a large number of America’s Presidents have been lawyers as well. Does legal training impart executive capability?

It’s certainly not necessary for the Presidency. Ronald Reagan is among the highest-rated presidents in the 20^th Century, and he wasn’t a lawyer. What he did have though was a strong understanding of and appreciation for the Constitution. I think that’s vital for anyone in government. Kennedy is another popular, non-lawyer President from the last 50 years. Carter and Johnson were non-lawyers with questionably legacies. And Nixon and Clinton were lawyers who were both impeached. In my lifetime, there is no obvious correlation between legal training and presidential performance.

Is our American political system, courtesy of our Constitution, exportable?

Certainly there are important lessons and virtues that are exportable. Few countries have the same free speech protection we do. Not even England has as strong protections for speech. I think more countries ought to follow our lead. And that would have a significant impact on the government itself. If citizens are free to harshly criticize their government, they not only enjoy that freedom but it will tend to lead to better and more democratic government.

As a quick aside, it will be interesting to see if the Peoples Republic of China can continue to suppress political freedoms as it allows more economic freedom. People with economic freedom and the information necessary for global market power will want more political freedoms, but soldiers with tanks and guns exercise their own persuasive power.

Speaking of criticizing government: Is the President’s healthcare plan constitutional?

The individual mandate is clearly unconstitutional if we are concerned with the original meaning of Congress’s commerce power. Yet, Congress and the Supreme Court have read the commerce power much more broadly than the framing generation understood it to be. Under current judicial precedents, it’s a much closer call, but I still think the Supreme Court will strike the individual mandate down. There are several reasons, but I’ll mention two simple ones.

The first is that the mandate truly is unprecedented, which means there is no controlling judicial precedent for it—regardless of some claims to the contrary. Congress has never before attempted to require Americans to buy a particular product or service, even when the nation’s existence was at stake. For example, Americans were never required to buy war bonds in World War I or II.

Second, the Supreme Court has always been clear, even when it has approved a very broad exercise of commerce power, that there are some limits.  If Congress can regulate people for not purchasing something because staying out of the market would affect the market (even if that is so), then it can do anything. If the Court were to adopt that theory, it would be adopting a chaos theory of the commerce clause, one without any limits. I don’t think the Court will do that.

It’s the equivalent of requiring Americans to buy a new GM car every year. You wouldn’t even have to drive them. You could keep them all in front of your house. But every year, a family of four would have to buy a new car of a particular brand with particular equipment in order to stimulate the car market and to avoid certain transportation “externalities.”

I explained the constitutional arguments in a lot more detail in a paper I co-authored last December (see http://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2009/pdf/lm_0049.pdf) which I am happy to learn was entered in the Congressional Record during the healthcare debate. (Every think tanker hopes that will happen with their scholarship occasionally.)

Now, if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate, there is a question whether the rest of the legislation fails. The court would have to engage in a severability analysis. That’s an even tougher issue, but I think the sponsors of the Obamacare bill, including Senator Bauchus, made it clear the act couldn’t survive without the individual mandate.

The healthcare debate really seems to have been an issue that helped make the Tea Party a household name. What do you think of the Tea Party?

One encouraging aspect of the rise of the Tea Party is the participants’ hunger for knowledge about the Constitution. Some have wacky ideas about it. Some have rather impressive ideas and knowledge. It’s an important opportunity for all of us to help inform and educate Americans on the Constitution.

I also think the Tea Party movement is going to be part of a long-term trend, especially as concern over the scope and financing of government continues. Whether you believe in large government or think that government’s size should be reduced, the problems in Greece and Ireland suggest that paying for government entitlements anywhere near those that exist now is a very serious problem. And that often raises constitutional issues.

This age may be analogous to the Progressive Era, only with the opposite effect. Many early progressives in the academy thought constitutional doctrines limited the scope of national government to solve problems they thought were pressing. I think the opposite instinct is emerging today. The constitutional doctrines of today may be enabling a leviathan to trample the protections for liberty the framers enshrined in the Constitution.

What do you enjoy most about your job as Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies?

I especially enjoy organizing practice argument sessions for many of the advocates who are going to argue cases before the Supreme Court. In a given Supreme Court term, we might organize a practice “moot court” for about a dozen of the seventy or so cases the Court will decide. These are often some of the most important cases. We try to bring together the best Supreme Court advocates to help those who have never argued before the High Court. It’s always an interesting challenge. And there have been times when our guest advocates have told us they believe our preparation session made the difference in their winning the case.

Bill Rivers (DE ’09) currently directs marketing and fundraising for Water Is Life-Kenya, (www.kenyawaterislife.com) a Delaware-based non-profit dedicated to developing clean, sustainable water resources in Southern Kenya.

Anson Asbury (PA ‘90) has accepted an invitation to serve as the VP for Board Development for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Fulton County (Georgia).  Any Truman Scholars in the metro Atlanta area interested in becoming involved with Boys & Girls Clubs are invited to contact Anson. (His information is available via the Truman Scholars Network: http://www.truman.gov)

Shawn Vogt Sween (MN '99) and his family welcomed their fourth child on September 23.  Calum was born at home in Grand Meadow, Minnesota, weighing 10 pounds, 10 ounces and measuring 22.5 inches long.  “He's a content little guy, for which we're very thankful with #4.”

Monica Bell (SC '02) recently began an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellowship at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, where she’s focusing on anti-poverty policy advocacy on topics that span Legal Aid's practice areas -- family law, housing, public benefits, and consumer law -- as well as general access to justice issues.

After finishing his clerkship with Chancellor William Chandler ('79 LLM) of the Delaware Court of Chancery, Bryan Townsend (DE ’03) began work as an associate at Morris Nichols Arsht & Tunnell in Wilmington, DE, where he'll focus on administrative law and government affairs.  Bryan has become a member of the Special Olympics Delaware Fundraising Committee and a Big Brother with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Delaware.  He also recently transferred to the Christiana Fire Company from the Rehoboth Beach Volunteer Fire Company.  On Election Day 2010, Bryan served as Delaware's State Organizing Attorney for the Democratic Party's voter protection efforts.

A number of Scholars were awarded prestigious graduate fellowships: Tracy Yang (GA ’10) and Varun Sivarum (CA ’10) were named 2010 Rhodes Scholars; GJ Melendez-Torres (NJ ’10), Nick Wellkamp (KY-09) and Joel Mittleman (PA ‘08) were named 2010 Marshall Scholars; and Chelsea Caveny (MS ‘10) was named a 2010 Mitchell Scholar.

Please submit Class Notes to news@trumanscholars.org.

Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza (NC '09) authored a piece for The Huffington Post entitled, "Cambodia's Bon Om Touk Stampede Preventable."

Read the full article.

Ravi Gupta (NY '04), who recently started a charter school, was featured in The Tennessean.

Read the full article.

Truman Scholars Charting a New Course in Education

Part I: The Founders: Building Schools with No Excuses

This piece is the first in a series. See also "Part 2: The Transition: John King’s Journey from Charter to Public Schools"

By Christopher Sopher (VA '10)

Featuring:
Dacia Toll (MD ’93), Co-CEO and President, Achievement First
Seth Andrew (RI ’99), Founder and Superintendent, Democracy Prep Schools
Ravi Gupta (NY, ’04), Fellow, Building Excellent Schools

Over the last few years, charter schools have generated an exceptional amount of interest and activity across the country, spurred by the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative and by encouraging results from the most successful charters. Nationwide there are some 1.5 million students attending more than 4,000 charter schools. It is a moment of great potential for leading education reformers who have spent years and sometimes decades developing, opening and running charter schools in some of the country’s lowest-income, lowest-performing districts.

A remarkable number of these leaders are Truman Scholars. I interviewed three Truman Scholars (among many, many more) who are involved in founding and running charter schools. This is their surprisingly connected story.

“A heck of an opportunity”

Dacia Toll had just returned from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and was starting law school at Yale, when the state of Connecticut passed its first charter school legislation in 1996. “It basically says to community leaders and entrepreneurs and others who are concerned about kids, ‘If you think there's a better way to do it and put together a robust plan and team, we'll actually let you run a public school,’” says Toll (MD ’93). “And that's a heck of an opportunity.”

Toll and a group of her fellow Yale Law School students took the offer, and over the intervening 13 years she and her colleagues have transformed that opportunity—first into a charter middle school in New Haven, and then into one of the most respected charter school networks in America.

Toll had not planned a career in education. In college she was involved in journalism and poverty issues, and later spent several summers working for former President Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta Project, an antipoverty program.

“We worked with 18- to 30-year-olds, and we were preparing them for jobs that we would not want for our own kids. Without adequate educational background, it was not possible to access economic opportunity beyond a certain level. I had that experience over and over again ... It seemed like all the issues we were focused on in terms of job opportunities and issues of social equality and civil rights were really just downstream of unequal investments we were making in kids.”

That inequality found names and faces when Toll started a teacher prep program in New Haven Public Schools, while still in law school. “Something that was theoretical, something that I understood on a policy level became very real in my classroom of eight graders at Fair Haven Middle School.”

These experiences led Toll and her peers to found Amistad Academy, a charter middle school that opened in 1999 in one of New Haven’s toughest neighborhoods.

“There were officially I think 32 founders of Amistad. It ranged from the CEO of the local bank to a juvenile court judge to a child psychologist to a teacher, a parent. It was a wonderful mix. In New Haven there's always sensitivity to Yale projects. As a result we worked especially hard to broaden the founding team,” says Toll. “And it worked out really well.”

The founding team visited high-performing schools around the country, including some of the very first charter schools. They designed a “no-excuses” model, relentlessly focused on student achievement and quality teaching. Toll quickly found herself running Amistad.

“To make a long story short, the principal didn't work out, and by November of the first year, I was already starting to function as a principal, and I officially became the principal in the second year of the school. The story is, I loved the job. So I ended up doing that for six years.”

After only a few years in operation, Amistad began showing impressive results: performance gains with some of the most difficult students in the city, higher state test scores, high teacher satisfaction. The school was profiled in a PBS documentary and won a state award in 2006 for having the best middle school performance gains in Connecticut.

In Amistad’s fifth year, Toll’s partner and co-director (and fellow UNC alumnus) Doug McCurry left to found a second school in New Haven and start Achievement First, a charter network that now operates 17 schools serving predominantly low-income students in Connecticut and New York. Toll is co-CEO and president. Amistad’s early success has continued for Achievement First’s other schools.

“When Connecticut went to evaluate the performance gains [for schools across the state] without us in there, they said, we need to include the Achievement First schools. They needed to change the scales on the graph because the scores we so different between our kids and the rest.”

Success follows success...

In 2004, the same year Amistad was featured in a PBS documentary, Seth Andrew (RI ’99) arrived there for a one-year residency as a fellow with Building Excellent Schools, an organization that trains charter school founders and leaders.

After graduating from Brown University in 2000, Andrew followed his future wife to Korea, where he taught in a public school, an experience he says still informs his charter schools’ approach. Upon his return he taught and became an administrator in traditional public schools.

“I got very excited about teaching and about my practice, but really did not like the environment of the traditional school, which seemed stifling and bureaucratic, and my colleagues didn't have the same mission as I did,” says Andrew.

He left and became a fellow at Building Excellent Schools, which in 2005 helped him launch Democracy Prep charter school in central Harlem, one of New York City’s most historically troubled neighborhoods.

“I first tried to start Democracy Prep in Rhode Island almost ten years ago. The educational and political environments weren't supportive of bold reforms at that time,” says Andrew. “When we couldn't do it in Rhode Island we moved to New York, and had a very supportive chancellor and mayor and political environment, which meant that we were able to get Democracy Prep off the ground and open in 2006 in public school space.”

By 2009, Democracy Prep was the top performing school in Harlem. In September of 2010, New York City named it both the top middle school and top charter school in the entire city.

“I ran the school day-to-day as head of school for the first two years, and now we're running five schools in New York and Rhode Island, and that half of it is exciting, hard, challenging, brutal work,” says Andrew. “But it is incredibly rewarding because you get to see your results with kids every single day.”

Democracy Prep schools, like Dacia Toll’s Achievement First schools, follow a “no excuses” model. Andrew says the model has five elements: 1) more school time; 2) the use of data to measure outcomes and needs; 3) rigorous curriculum and high expectations; 4) a culture of respect and enthusiasm (what Andrew calls “the joy factor”); and 5) high-performing teachers. “The single most important thing of successful schools is really great teachers in every classroom,” he says.

Andrew’s experiences and early success have given him confidence in the model and the best practices it suggests for public education. “It's 100 percent clear. It's not something magic. It's a lot of work, but if you look at the highest performing schools around the country ... they all do exactly the same core principles.”

Despite opposition in some circles to these principles and to the charter school movement, Andrew says parents and students in New York have responded positively—so positively that student demand currently far exceeds the supply of charter school spots.

“We had 1,500 families apply last year for about 100 spots. Literally almost every kid who is eligible in District 5 for our program is putting in an application to our school. For New York, there are 40,000 families on the waiting list trying to get into charter schools.”

“I want to do what he’s doing”

In the summer of 2009, while Democracy Prep was busy becoming central Harlem’s best public school, Ravi Gupta (NY ’04) wandered into a panel session at the Truman Scholars Association’s first National Conference in Washington, DC.

“In the meeting there were Trumans who had started charter schools and were involved in education. I saw an incredible guy named Seth Andrew ... and I was blown away by his presentation. I was so floored by his take on charter schools, and by his passion for the cause ... that I said to myself, I want to do what he's doing. I slipped him a note and told him I would be e-mailing him. I sent him an e-mail the next day telling him I wanted to do what he was doing, and he told me to apply for Building Excellent Schools.”

Gupta had just graduated from Yale Law School and was working as an assistant to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice (DC ‘84), a job he had maintained while in law school, after taking a year off to work for the Obama for America presidential campaign.

“I almost immediately applied and was accepted, but had to defer for a year because I had an obligation to work for Susan Rice. But I knew what I wanted to do. Seth is a warrior. There are few people I've met in life who are as passionate and dedicated and effective as he is. He was a big part of it.”

Gupta is now a fellow with Building Excellent Schools, where he is studying school leadership and preparing to launch a charter school in Nashville, Tennessee.

“My dream in life is to start a school where I grew up in Staten Island, but an opportunity presented itself to build a school in Tennessee because they won Race to the Top ... and I jumped at the chance. I love the people in Tennessee, and I'm loving Nashville.

“We're getting used to the grind of running a school. But for me, that's not too much of an adjustment. I went from campaign world, working seven days a week until 1 a.m., to the UN, where every day there's another crisis to respond to.”

“I hear a lot of people tell me that it's not possible in medium-sized cities, or not possible in that region. But if you look around this country, there are a handful of schools out there defying the odds, and they're doing it all over the place,” says Gupta.

What’s next

Toll, Andrew and Gupta all say they expect the movement to grow in the years ahead.

“There really is a quiet revolution taking place,” says Toll. “Through Race to the Top and other things, we have seen more progress in the last 18 months than we've seen in the previous decade.”

Andrew, for his part, is ready to open more schools.

“We need more high-performing charter schools ... I told the chancellor [of New York City schools Joel Klein] in no uncertain terms, that we will build as many Democracy Pep schools in Harlem as they will provide us buildings,” he said. “We want to serve our community so that there is no lottery and no waiting list. We want to get to the point where supply meets demand, and we have enough spots for everybody who wants one.”

All three founders credit the Truman community with support, ideas and inspiration, and say they hope the connections continue to the next generation of school founders and leaders.

“The Truman community is like wind in your sails, having a whole group who shares your values and commitment,” says Toll.

“There is no better advice than from those who have done it; to sit down individually and talk with the great resources the Truman community has,” says Gupta. “Seth helped me, and I'm ready to [help other] folks who want to get involved.”

Chris Sopher (VA ’10) is a senior in his last semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studies public policy.

Help us find the "Lost Truman Scholars"! It probably comes as no surprise to you that many Scholars have moved and changed jobs and schools multiple times since winning the Scholarship, and unfortunately, we haven't always been able to keep up with them. Our goal is to have all Scholars log into the Truman Foundation's Truman Scholars Network at http://www.truman.gov to update their contact information and biographies.

This month, we'd like your help in identifying these Scholars from the Class of 2000. If you have current information for these Scholars, please direct them to this link or fill the information in yourself, and we'll follow up: http://www.trumanscholars.org/keep-in-touch/lostscholars

Sara Galvan Bronin (TX)
Sandra Chapin (CA)
Renae Griggs (FL)
David Haskell (CT)
Sarah Hirschman (DC)
Jatin Joshi (NC)
Shreya Kangovi (NJ)
Garrett Meyers (MI)
Kevin Schwartz (NY)
Robert Wittman (NV)

Luke Messac (NY '07), an AIDS activist, was featured in a New York Times piece.

Read the full article.